Microsoft to open source key pieces of its 'Chakra' JavaScript engine
Microsoft plans to publish the core components of its "Chakra" JavaScript engine to GitHub under an MIT open source license in January 2016.
Company officials announced the plans, which had been rumored for the past few weeks, at the JSConf on December 5.
Chakra was the codename for the JavaScript engine that Microsoft built to power Internet Explorer 9 and which it has used in subsequent IE and Edge browser releases. I didn't realize until this until this week that the Chakra engine also is powering Cortana, Outlook.com, Azure DocumentDB and TypeScript. With Windows 10, Microsoft enabled Node.js to run with Chakra, enabling Node.js to work on Windows 10 IoT Core.